ISIS Has Executed Scores in Iraq This Month, U.N. Says

By Nick Cumming-Bruce

Jan. 20, 2015

GENEVA — Islamic State extremists have carried out scores of execution-style killings in Iraq this month, the United Nations said on Tuesday, reporting “cruel and inhuman” punishment of men, women and children in areas under their control.

Two men believed to be members of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, who were accused of banditry, were tied by their arms to a cross and then shot in the northern city of Mosul; two other men who had been accused of homosexual acts were thrown off a rooftop in the city after a summary hearing by an ad hoc court, the United Nations human rights office said.

Their “ruthless murder” provided “another terrible example of the kind of monstrous disregard for human life that characterizes ISIL’s reign of terror over areas of Iraq that are under the group’s control,” the United Nations said.

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The killings often followed summary proceedings by a court in which the accused were brought in, told the offense they were being accused of, pronounced guilty and taken away to be executed, a United Nations human rights official said.

In other cases, four doctors in Mosul, including women, were killed for refusing to treat Islamic State fighters; three female lawyers in the city were also reportedly executed; and a woman was stoned to death after being accused of adultery, the human rights monitors said.

“We have received numerous other reports of women who have been executed by ISIL in Mosul and other areas under the group’s control, often immediately following sentences passed by its so-called Shariah courts,” the United Nations said in a statement. “Educated, professional women, particularly women who have run as candidates in elections for public office seem to be particularly at risk.”

United Nations officials said they could not confirm accounts circulated by an anti-Islamic State group that 13 teenage boys had been caught and machine-gunned in public for watching a football match between Iraq and Jordan on television last week, but they cited other instances of mass executions of civilians.

Islamic State gunmen killed 15 civilian members of a Sunni tribe accused of cooperating with Iraqi security forces in the area of Falluja, shooting them in front of a large crowd, according to the officials. In another town near Tikrit, Islamic State gunmen killed 14 civilians who had refused to pledge allegiance to the group, the United Nations said, bringing the number of verified executions in less than three weeks to 41.

Many other execution-style killings were under investigation, the United Nations said, including husbands reportedly killed as punishment for their wives’ failure or refusal to adhere to dress codes, while women have been subjected to beatings for dressing improperly.

The $200 million ransom demanded by the Islamic State on Tuesday for two Japanese hostages dramatically highlighted another reportedly widespread practice of abducting civilians and holding them for payment of a ransom by their family, the United Nations said. Taking hostages for ransom has flourished with the mounting sectarian conflict and lawlessness in Iraq and Syria, and human rights officials specified that ransom demands had been received from Islamic State members.

Rule in areas under Islamic State control was “characterized by the sheer brutality of its attacks on the most vulnerable sectors of society, including women, children, and ethnic and religious communities,” the United Nations said. The panel investigating human rights in Syria had previously described how women from Iraq’s Yazidi minority captured by Islamic State fighters last year had been sold as war booty into sexual slavery.

A pamphlet made available by human rights officials and purporting to have come from the Islamic State’s “Research and Fatwa Department” in November laid out justification for taking women captive, whether and when it was permissible to have sex with them and how they could be treated. “It is permissible to buy, sell or give as gifts, female captives and slaves as they are merely property that can be disposed of,” it said.